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I am a Natural Born United States Citizen with NO allegiance or citizenship to any nation but my own, and will use this site as a hobby place of sorts to present my own political and religious viewpoints, as a genuine Constitutional Conservative and a genuine Christian Conservative.

Thank you for coming. -------------------------------------------------------------------In the Year of our LORD Jesus Christ 2017

--As of January 20, 2017

A Sigh Of Relief With The Inauguration Of Donald John Trump as President of the United States of America, And Hope For A Prosperous Future For All United States Citizens (we who are a nation called "the melting pot of the world"). We shall be great and exceptionally great again.

Peace and Liberty. Semper Fidelis.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Guest Blog: Robert D. Kaplan of Stratfor - Syria and the Limits of Comparison

Because
so many war plans simply do not survive the reality of war itself, each war is
a unique universe unto its own and thus comparisons with previous wars, while
useful, may also prove illusory. One of the many wrong assumptions about the
Second Gulf War before it started was that it would somehow be like the First Gulf
War, in which the pessimists had been humiliated by the ease of the victory.
Indeed, the Second Gulf War unfolded in vastly different ways, this time
proving the pessimists right. That is why the recent media refrain comparing a
military operation in Syria with the one in Kosovo in 1999 worries
me.

There
are profound differences.

Syria
has a population ten times the size of Kosovo's in 1999. Because everything in
Syria is on a much vaster scale, deciding the outcome by military means could
be that much harder.

Kosovo
sustained violence and harsh repression at the hands of Serbian leader Slobodan
Milosevic, which was met with a low-intensity separatist campaign by the Kosovo
Liberation Army. Violence was widespread but not nearly on the scale of
Syria's. Syria is in the midst of a full-fledged civil war. The toppling of
Milosevic, moreover, carried much less risk of ever-expanding anarchy than does
the toppling of Syrian ruler Bashar al Assad.

Kosovo
was more or less contained within the southern Balkans, with relatively limited
chance for a spillover -- as it turned out -- into neighboring countries and
territories. Full-scale sectarian anarchy in Syria threatens to destabilize a wider region.

The
Kosovo Liberation Army may have been a nasty bunch by some accounts, with
criminal elements. But it was not a threat to the United States like the
transnational jihadists currently operating in Syria. For President Bill
Clinton to risk bringing to power the Kosovo Liberation Army was far less of a
concern than President Barack Obama possibly helping to midwife to power a
Sunni jihadist regime.

The
Kosovo war campaign did not have to countenance a strong and feisty Russia,
which at the time was reeling from Boris Yeltsin's incompetent, anarchic rule.
Vladimir Putin, who has significant equities in al Assad's Syria, may do
everything in his power to undermine a U.S. attack. Though, it must be said,
Putin's options should Obama opt for a significant military campaign are
limited within Syria itself. But Putin can move closer to Iran by leaving the
sanctions regime, and ratchet-up Russia's anti-American diplomacy worldwide
more effectively than Yeltsin ever wanted to, or was capable of.

The
Kosovo war did not engage Iran as this war must. For all of the missiles that
America can fire, it does not have operatives on the ground like Iran has. Neither
will the United States necessarily have the patience and fortitude to prosecute
a lengthy and covert ground-level operation as Iran might for years to come,
and already has. A weakened or toppled al Assad is bad for Iran, surely, but it
does not altogether signal that America will therefore receive a good result
from this war. A wounded Iran might race even faster toward a nuclear option.
It is a calculated risk.

The
Kosovo war inflicted significant pain on Serbian civilians through airstrikes,
but the Syrian population has already been pummeled by a brutal war for two
years now, and so it is problematic whether airstrikes in this case can inflict
that much more psychological pain on the parts of the population either still
loyal or indifferent to the regime.

The
goal in Kosovo was to limit Serbia's geographic influence and to ignite a chain
of events that would lead to Milosevic's ouster. Those goals were achieved:
Milosevic was forced from power in the fall of 2000, largely because of a chain
of events stemming from that war. His ouster, as I wrote in The New York
Times on Oct. 6, 2000, meant the de facto death of the last ruling
Communist Party in Europe, even if in its final years it had adopted
national-fascism as a tactic. Because the war was in significant measure a
result of the efforts of a single individual, Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, it demonstrated how individuals can dramatically alter history for
the better.

Kosovo
thus symbolized the power of human agency over impersonal forces in order to
wrest a victory for human rights. This is a popular cause among liberal
journalists and intellectuals, as is the desire to do something to
punish the massive human rights violations of the al Assad regime. The
comparison between Kosovo and Syria follows from that. But it is a flawed
comparison: Elegantly toppling Milosevic incurred no negative side effects.
Toppling al Assad could lead to a power center in the Levant as friendly to
transnational jihadists as the one in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was in the
late 1990s until 2001.

Of
course, the Obama administration will try to calibrate its military effort in a
way to avoid further jihadi chaos in Syria. But even with overwhelming
firepower, it is not necessarily in control. Whereas ending Milosevic's rule
meant an end to ethnic cleansing, it is far from certain that sectarian carnage
would end with al Assad's demise; it might possibly even intensify, with Sunnis
exacting revenge on a weakened and cornered Alawite community.

Obama
faces a dilemma more extreme than the one Clinton faced in Kosovo. If he
chooses limited military strikes to send a message against the use of chemical
weapons, he risks looking weak, especially following the powerful rhetoric
employed by his secretary of state, John Kerry. If he chooses regime change --
while not calling it that -- he threatens to unleash a jihadi nightmare. He may
try a middle option calibrated to seriously erode al Assad's power base while
sending a message to Russia and Iran to help him negotiate a stable transfer of
authority in Damascus -- something that might yet open up a wider diplomatic
process with Iran. But that is obviously very difficult to do.

Keep
another thing in mind about Kosovo. At that time, the United States had not
been in a ground war for a quarter-century and thus the American people were
not weary of war. Even so, Clinton rightly calculated that the public would not
tolerate casualties on the ground in a war that did not involve a naked
American interest. But the American public is now tottering from more than a
decade of bloody ground war, and so Obama has even less leeway than Clinton,
even as Syria presents a greater military challenge than Kosovo.

So
far, Obama has handled the Middle East tolerably well. He has reduced and ended
ground force commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, while avoiding quagmires
elsewhere in the face of regional change and chaos. This is in keeping with the
leadership of a global maritime power that has serious military commitments in
Asia and elsewhere, even as its energy dependency on the Middle East is on the
wane. But Obama now faces a defining event that will test his commitment to
keep America out of regional quicksand while being able to wield considerable
power in the region at the same time. If Obama prosecutes a significant
military operation, one thing is certain: Syria will be its own war for the
United States with its own narrative, for better or worse.

---------------------------------------------------

The opinions above are that of Robert D. Kaplan. While I do not necessarily agree with him in his friendly opinions to Obama, it is important that we are aware that America is entering this conflict with the same kind delusional political and media lap-dogs as who follow a third-world dictator idolized beyond celebrity status into near deification; and of a sort where he is at best mildly questioned as to ability, never his illegality to the nations Constitution or the nefarious motives he has.

Obama operates as if he is "above the law" because that is precisely what Congress, the Supreme Court, the Military, and the various elite of great influence in this country have allowed this foreign national usurper of the Presidency, who voted for himself as an Indonesian citizen Barry Soetoro for himself as Barack Obama in 2012, to do.

To the general public, this is NOT well known. Nor is it as well known that the U.S. Military has been "hollowed out" into a shell of its former self in the past several years under Obama, so that we are no longer a Conventional super-power.

Obama is determined to do one of two things with a confrontation and a U.S. military attack upon the sovereign nation of Syria: either to create a new Caliphate run by the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda terrorists by overthrowing Syria (continuing his policy in making the U.S. a State-sponsor or global Islamic terrorism), or if well opposed enough (by Russia, Iran, and others allied to them) so that he can't overthrow Syria for Islamic terrorism; then Obama also sees the benefit in degrading the perception of U.S. Military strength in the world and showing weakness in its inability and the appearance of cowardice before Islam, in order to spur on more terror attacks against the U.S. and the "colonialist" West, to make us "pay" for the sins of our historical past in daring to have ever been world super-powers and prosperous in world trade and resources. Never mind China's current enslaving millions of people in Africa and South America to mine and strip them of their resources, they don't count because they are Communists. And in Obama's mind, Communists and Muslims must have the political and economic and "preference" deck stacked for them, where the only rule in "the game" is that they (the Communist-Socialists and the Muslims) must near always "win" and Conservatives, Christians, Republicans, Constitutionalists, Free Societies, et cetera, must "lose". To Obama, THAT is "social justice" leaving the obvious absence of "race" out of the equation, which "domestic" application and hostile negro/black racist bigotry upon the part of Obama and his Attorney General and others is not relevant to the discussion on Syria.

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A Born-Again Christian Conservative and Fundamentalist. A Republican with a very pro-defense, pro-US Cold War view of politics and the world. I also have, as a non-Jew, a Pro-Israel political and religious position as a born-again Christian Conservative.